TY - JOUR AU - Rosés,Joan R. AU - O'Rourke,Kevin H. AU - Williamson,Jeffrey G. TI - Globalization, Growth and Distribution in Spain 1500-1913 JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 13055 PY - 2007 Y2 - April 2007 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13055 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13055.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Joan R.. Roses Department of Economic History & Institutions Carlos III de Madrid University Madrid 28903 Spain E-Mail: jroses@clio.uc3m.es Kevin H. O'Rourke All Souls College Oxford University Oxford OX1 4AL, UK Tel: + 44 (0)1865 279 348 Fax: 353-1-6772503 E-Mail: kevin.orourke@all-souls.ox.ac.uk Jeffrey G. Williamson 350 South Hamilton Street #1002 Madison, WI 53703 Tel: 608-441-0023 Fax: 608-204-0783 E-Mail: jwilliam@fas.harvard.edu AB - The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently, economic historians have presented evidence from England showing that the dramatic reversal in distributional trends -- from a steep secular fall in wage-land rent ratios before 1800 to a steep secular rise thereafter -- must be explained both by industrial revolutionary growth forces and by global forces that opened up the English economy to international trade. This paper explores whether and how the relationship was different for Spain, a country which had relatively poor productivity growth in agriculture and low living standards prior to 1800, was a late-comer to industrialization afterwards, and adopted very restrictive policies towards imports for much of the 19th century. The failure of Spanish wage-rental ratios to undergo a sustained rise after 1840 can be attributed to the delayed fall in relative agricultural prices (due to those protective policies) and to the decline in Spanish manufacturing productivity after 1898. ER -